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AlwaysOnVideos uploaded a new video
(3 days ago)
In an interview yesterday with Michael Moritz (Forbes’ 2x Midas List win...
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In an interview yesterday with Michael Moritz (Forbes’ 2x Midas List winner), California controller John Chiang hinted that venture capital could see even less money than might be hoped from Calprs and Calstrs, two of the biggest Limited Partners sugar daddies that VCs go to for funds.
Moritz asked Chiang, who sits on the ___ of the firms, how the funds were doing. Chiang, it what appeared to be a bit of on-stage negotiating intimated that many “alternative investments” were not “high quality,” and that the standard 2-and-20 management fees typically doled out to fund managers would have to be re-evaluated.
In other words, if VCs, who as an investment block have performed poorly in the last decade, want a piece of California’s shrinking public funds, they’re going to have to take a serious paycut.
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AlwaysOnVideos uploaded a new video
(1 week ago)
HP is equipping environmentalist and adventurer David de Rothschild with...
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HP is equipping environmentalist and adventurer David de Rothschild with the technology needed to sail 10,000 miles across the Pacific on a boat made entirely of plastic bottles. (disclosure: HP is a paying sponsor of AlwaysOn)
The Pacific Ocean is home to the worlds biggest trash dump, and a large portion of that is plastic. In an attempt to raise awareness of the oceanic mess, David de Rothschild, founder of Adventure Ecology, is readying a sea voyage from San Francisco to Sydney, Australia, aboard the Plastiki, a boat made entirely of plastic bottles. Rothschild says discoveries like that of the Great Pacific Garbage Patch inspired the expedition.
I was like, hang on a second. This cant be true, he said in a recent interview. Why doesnt everybody know about this? Why dont we know about the fact that our oceans are basically filling up with trash?
By turning the symbol of waste into an adventure, Rothschild hopes to inspire young people to develop smart solutions to environmental problems. Plastiki, built from 13,000 recycled softdrink bottles, is intended to showcase how innovative technology can be used to turn waste into a resource.
The technology needed to complete the voyage is coming, appropriately, from Silicon Valleys firstborn, HP*. The tech bellweather will equip the Plastiki crew with the material to capture and share data gathered on the voyage. HP materials include notebooks with magnesium-alloy casing and battery-efficient designs, HP smartphones, and media drives from which pictures and videos of the expedition will be uploaded to the Plastiki website.
HP is also helping to build Plastiki Mission Control, an interactive activity and educational center located at Pier 45 in San Francisco, CA. The center will feature 10 interactive, energy-efficient HP TouchSmart IQ816 PCs to display blueprints and sketches, expedition equipment, maps, and films explaining the technology behind the Plastiki Expedition.
Satjiv Chahil, senior vice president of global marketing at HP, told ...
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AlwaysOnVideos uploaded a new video
(1 month ago)
Since the administration's announcement in March that $2.4B would go to ...
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Since the administration's announcement in March that $2.4B would go to hybrid plug-in car initiatives, green VCs have been trekking to DC with their hats in their hands.
No doubt, the turn of events makes many in the traditionally libertarian VC ecosystem uneasy. One possible exception are the partners at KPCB, who have a longer history of governmental cooperation, typified by their decision in 2007 to bring Al Gore on as a partner.
Ray Lane, one of the most even-keeled VCs in the Valley, prescribes a dose of sobriety. He notes that many of the large-scale, high-tech developments of the last century, from automobiles to the Internet, had their origins in government-funded projects. His take is that Uncle Sam's involvement is a promising temporary treatment for the cash-flow crunch, but anticipates a return to more private system once the economy recovers.
So far, Tesla and Fisker and Bright Automotive have been leading the publicity charge to win DOE dollars, with bids in the $350M to $400M range. KPCB has a small stake in Fisker, and last year teamed up with Rockport Capital and Norweigen car maker Think Global to form a mass-market plug-in car company called Think North America.
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AlwaysOnVideos uploaded a new video
(1 month ago)
Since the post-Enron regulation that doubled the time needed for startup...
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Since the post-Enron regulation that doubled the time needed for startups to go public, VCs have been thirsty for liquidity. The recent pullback in funding from LPs has left the VC community even more parched.
With fewer exit possibilities and less money to keep late-stage companies afloat, the venture capital ecosystem is in for a serious overhaul. But VCs are no strangers to rapid adaptation. The thirst for liquidity has driven an increase in second-market stock trading, most notoriously in the case of Facebook, whose stockholders have been busy trading shares on the not-so down-low.
Some VCs see opportunity in the current cash-flow crunch. Tim Draper, whose various funds invest in over 500 startups, unveiled one of his latest investments, Xchange, at Venture Summit East in late May. Xchange is a trading platform for private-company stock where VCs, equity holders, and qualified buyers can trade restricted assets based on a tightly-controlled system for sharing private company information. I caught up with Draper and CEO Thomas Foley at Venture Summit East
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AlwaysOnVideos uploaded a new video
(1 month ago)
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